Severance features Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Christopher Walken, John Turturro and more. Credit: AppleTV+

“Every writer is a sellout. The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency, causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form of content.” — Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, 1972

On Jan. 17, a magnificently well-executed piece of twisted sci-fi returned for a second season. Yet its viewership is nowhere near what it could be.

“Almost none of you have seen Severance,” novelist Jason Pargin told his half million TikTok followers, “because it is on Apple TV+, a streaming service that almost nobody watches.”

According to U.S. search data compiled by Google Trends, interest in Severance at its peak was just 30% what HBO’s Westworld was back in 2016, and compared to Netflix’s Squid Game, it drew a mere 7% of the internet queries.

That’s despite two Oscar winners, Particia Arquette and Christopher Walken, giving evocative performances alongside Coen brothers-staple John Turturro and Adam Scott of Parks and Rec fame. Had Severance aired on network television in the early aughts, Pargin hypothesized, the show would have achieved a “rabid cult following” with a vast audience obsessing over every hidden Easter egg. As it stands, fans have had to wait almost three years for a followup to the cliffhanger
that aired April 8, 2022.

In the 1999 comedy Office Space, a burned-out computer programmer named Peter Gibbons asks an occupational hypno-therapist: “Is there any way that you could sort of just zonk me out so that, like, I don’t know that I’m at work? Could I come home and think that I’ve been fishing all day or something?”

Severance is that concept if Franz Kafka had run with it. To that point, Inkoo Kang, television critic for The New Yorker described the show as a “tidy allegory for the misery of the modern office drone.”

The “innies” — employees at the Lumon company — are stuck in a routinized world of superficial interactions replete with fake positivity and corporate-speak. When they leave for the day, they lose all memory of what transpired at work and resume their previous lives, rejoining us in the real world where our relatively comfortable existences rely on the exploitation of those we seldom have to meet.
Upon returning to the office, they pick right up where they left off, as if they never left.

“It’s an unnatural state for a person to have no history,” Irving Bailiff, a veteran true believer at Lumon, played by Turturro, admits in the third episode. “History makes us someone. Gives us a context. A shape. … But then I learned that I work for a company that has been actively caring for mankind since 1866.”

Capitalism itself is only a century or two older, and the show helps flesh out the multitude of meanings with which anti-capitalists from Karl Marx to Jimmy Reid
have imbued the term “alienation.”

What the medical procedure in The Eternal Sunshine of A Spotless Mind does for relationship trauma, the chip in Severance does for workaday toil. The soundtrack would fit right in on David Shire’s score for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance mystery The Conversation. And a half-sickening Philip K. Dick/Twilight Zone/Twin Peaks disorientation oozes from the screen. One might also mention the film The Substance as a similarly timely meditation on achieving a healthy work-life balance.

Or as Winston mansplains to Julia in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them … History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Season 2 of Apple’s other series that plums the depths of the “endless present,” Silo, wraps the same day as the new Severance airs. Think the Snowpiercer train but underground and vertical.

Is the largest corporation on Earth trying to slip us a secret note full of dystopian thoughtcrimes? Or, as Orwell feared, does imaginative resistance only re-entrench
systems of control all the more? In both drama and politics, we appear condemned to repeat the erasure of the past.

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This article appears in Jan 8-21, 2025.